


your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet

by meikuree (rillarev), rillarev



Series: maybe it's my hard head that keeps me dreaming [6]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Accidental Kissing, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Universe, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Introspection, Pining, annie accidentally kisses pieck; a confession spills out afterwards, discussions of trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28777884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/pseuds/meikuree, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillarev/pseuds/rillarev
Summary: Perhaps it’s the fact that Pieck reminds Annie of the better half of herself, of what she could be if she tried to reconcile all the thorns and barbs waging mental bloodshed inside her. The girl is disillusioned underneath her deceptive placidity and at times cynical, but not jaded or fatalistic like she is, not in the way that made Annie almost enshroud herself in jagged crystal not too long ago.
Relationships: Pieck Finger/Annie Leonhart
Series: maybe it's my hard head that keeps me dreaming [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652560
Comments: 16
Kudos: 33





	your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet

**Author's Note:**

> alternatively: I wrote 3.5k words about these two kissing and threw in a free side of angst/pining 
> 
> set in a canon-divergent au where Annie is back in Marley with the Warriors after the events in paradis, somehow. I tried not to worry too much about technicalities with this one, to be honest-- this is mostly about how Pieck and Annie would have interacted in this scenario.
> 
> cw for passing mentions of panic/anxiety and general discussions of trauma (though not highly detailed or graphic)

> _[...] you fall from the sky  
>  with several flowers, words spill from your mouth  
>  in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees   
>  and seas have flown away, I call it  
>  loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,   
>  a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,   
>  and free of any eden we can name  
>  _— “You, Therefore”, Reginald Shepherd

* * *

It isn’t clear which comes first: the moment when Annie decides to forgo all rational thought, or the instant when she’s moving from her seated position on the bed towards Pieck— but whatever the answer is, what she knows is this: suddenly, before she has the opportunity to second-guess it, she’s kissing Pieck on the lips.

It happens so quickly she doesn’t register what she’s doing at first. Annie, usually the chronic overthinker, moves instead of the accord of some reflexive, inarticulate want within her. She closes her eyes as she presses close to Pieck, all the better to focus on the moment with. Her attention narrows to the feeling of Pieck’s lips on hers, steady and grounding and _warm_ like a crackling ember.

What she does register is the sound of a brief, surprised inhale from Pieck, and then Pieck recovering quickly, relaxing into her touch, _reciprocating_. Pieck— or it might be Annie herself, she isn’t sure right now— raises a hand to cup the other person’s cheek and adjust their face to a slightly better angle to deepen the kiss, and Pieck hums in appreciation. The sound is swallowed by her lips, but she feels the vibration dance across her skin. She’s overcome with an uncharacteristic flush of lightheadedness, better than the sort she’s gotten when she drinks expensive alcohol smuggled and slid discreetly to the Military Police from the city. 

And then a small frisson of euphoria runs up her back as Pieck parts her lips wider for her, slow and careful, and wraps an arm around Annie’s shoulder to steady the both of them. All her thoughts blur into a haze, but one in particular crosses her mind: _this feels nice_. 

Inexplicably, the seconds preceding this one blur into a vague haze. Their surroundings reduce to a muddle of unimportant colours and light in the corner of her eye. She closes her eyes and sinks easily into the pull of Pieck’s hands upon her. There’s what feels like a touch of gravity there, solid but relenting, holding her fast to Pieck’s embrace—

— until she lets out a shaky breath from the lack of air. 

All at once, her thoughts slam back into her head like a torrent of cold water. It happens not so much like a knife cleaving the moment as a sledgehammer smashing its weight into her senses. With an abrupt jolt, she pulls back suddenly and violently, shoving Pieck’s arms away from her as she does so.

For a second she almost regrets doing it, when she sees Pieck’s eyes widening in concern. But she turns away resolutely in— shame? fear?— while holding a dazed hand up to cover her own lips, absently pressing at them as if they have been bloodied. 

Only the echo of a harsh reprimand lodges itself in her mind now, loud as the panic burgeoning unbidden alongside it: _what are you doing? What have you done?_ She tries to prolong the silence between the two of them, to put as many seconds as she can between the inevitable moment she has to explain herself and reveal all her embarrassing heart-guts. She refuses stubbornly to look at Pieck. Her loose hair hangs over her face now, conveniently disguising her expression. Her mouth wills itself to stay shut. 

She wonders for a fleeting moment what Pieck thinks of her, and then clamps the thought down in favour of focusing on the evening-clad trees outside the window. The rise and fall of their breathing, now louder and uneven from their efforts to catch their breaths, is all that is audible in the room for a while.

Annie can be an impulsive person, at certain times. It typically serves her well, in the heat of battle or training. Where others dawdle too much because of panicked overthinking, she acts with decisive momentum, making the first tactical move towards disabling an enemy or flying towards a safe point. It helps that she is _strategically_ and not moronically impulsive, as contradictory as that seems. Her good intuition and sharp instincts ensure it becomes a strength where it would otherwise be a flaw.

But what she has just done is not that. This is entirely different. This is the wrong situation for recklessness, and for that her self-loathing surges forth with a vengeance now. 

Thinking without acting is justifiable in different circumstances, when the imminent snapping of a titan’s jaws looms too close behind or a teammate’s shoddy bladework flies one inch too close to her shin. She’s seen what hesitating did to Marcel. She doesn’t need reminders. 

It is less justified when she uses it to do something utterly self-indulgent like this. It is low, even for a low-lifer like her. 

She sinks back into mortified lucidity. The images of how she came to be sitting here are incessant, now. She doesn't need the reminders— of how she came to be sitting here, in Pieck’s very bed, suffocated almost into a hyperventilating panic, close enough to have kissed her and close enough to make a repeat performance of the act, even now— but they circle unforgivingly within her head still, a chokehold of persecution wrought by a mind that never learned how to lighten up on cruelty, self-inflicted forms of it most of all. 

She remembers the military soirée that came before this— a relatively small and quiet celebration for their Pyrrhic victory in the Middle East War, that equivalent of an embarrassing backwater among Marley’s most recent operations which everyone was keen to tidy over and forget. She had gone out of grudging obligation, dragging her feet to the door, then unexpectedly found herself staying for reasons she could not say— only that she had ended up enjoying Colt and Pieck’s company on some level after all, laughing discreetly in a corner with them at the gaffes the other hangers-on and commanders present were making.

At some point, when the night had been hovering on the cusp between oldness and not-yet-oldness, Pieck had announced she was tired and would be heading back to her room. Annie had turned around to disappear through the door with Pieck— it wasn't as if there was much left for her to do at the celebration. And then, a deadly accumulation of small details had followed— she’d wrapped her arm around Pieck’s back, because she was weakened and needed someone to support her after another stint in her titan. That had put her into frighteningly close quarters with Pieck, her warmth bleeding into her side. Their footsteps had echoed agonisingly in the dark, as Pieck leaned her weight into her embrace— and she’d tried vainly to resolve her face into blanket impassivity, to focus on something, anything other than the feeling of Pieck’s body pressing against her like they were always meant to be close together. 

She has known for a painfully long time, of course, that she is fond— too fond— of Pieck. She isn't sure when exactly it started, simply that something about the girl drew Annie to her. It was something that vexed her when she’d just made her return to Marley’s mainland. _Of course_ she was going to fall for the only other remotely attractive girl around. And yet, how irksome it was that she was doing something so pedestrian as becoming infatuated— and with Pieck, no less. It marked her as simply another person in the long file of men and women who were head over heels in love with Pieck, and she was loath to be grouped with common folk like them now too. 

But there had troublingly been more to it, especially after they’d been housed in the same room at the base. There was nothing to shelter her against growing attraction, when she was now the person in the closest proximity to Pieck. Among the other Warriors, there was no-one she knew as much about or was as comfortable with as Pieck. She was privy to her many little, mundane habits: the way Pieck would darn up her uniform by the orange candlelight, the way she would read books about Marley’s political history by the window, her lips quirked downwards in contemplation, the sounds of laughter she made when she was happy and conversely the sombre silence that marked her sadness, and the way her sleeping silhouette looked in the moonlight when she was simultaneously too close to and too far from Annie. Annie had first been intrigued by the side of Pieck she saw in battle, all commanding authority and quiet competence, but it was the little details that had made her fall even deeper into a pit of her own self-sabotaging emotions. She found herself wishing, in quiet moments in bed, that she had been the one to accompany Annie to Paradis. They’d have gotten the job done much quicker.

There were so many things she, deep down, found lovely about Pieck, and for someone not used to thinking of the world in those terms, that was the most terrifying thing of all. 

All that had only left the inevitable to occur once they’d made it back to their room. Pieck hadn't let go of her hand. She’d simply patted the space next to her on her bed as she sat down in invitation. And Annie had joined her and seen what imagined to be a meaning-laden look in her eyes, full of gratitude or even something approaching reverence. She had been so impossibly close she could discern the creases around those eyes as she smiled, noticing suddenly the way her heart had sped up to an impossible arrhythmia that her body now shook with.

Something in her had decided there was no better time, apparently.

 _And then she had_ — 

There’s no point completing the thought. 

But she knows there’s no escaping the fact— she just kissed Pieck. On the dash of the slimmest whim. Or because, she's mortifyingly aware, she’s fancied the girl a stupid amount for a while. And now she has to own up to it.

After what feels like an eternity, Pieck is the first to speak up, to nobody’s surprise. Annie has been resolutely staying her hand, with how utterly afraid she is of saying anything right now. 

“Annie?” she says quietly, a little breathily. Her voice is low, almost blending in with the slow breeze coming from the windows. “Are you alright?”

Annie tries in vain to steel herself first, and then— reluctantly knowing she can't put off a confrontation forever— glances up to look Pieck in the eye.

What she finds is not the judgement or rebuke she expects. Pieck’s face is soft, her mouth slightly parted; whether in a mild expression of questioning, or lingering breathlessness from the kiss, Annie can't tell and doesn't dare to discern right now. There are a thousand questions circling between the both of them, a thousand questions lying dormant but at imminent risk of boiling over. 

Annie closes her eyes briefly and tilts her head back, inhaling deeply to try and calm herself down. She feels unsteady in her body. All the possible consequences of what she's done— that Pieck might dislike her, that she might not reciprocate, that she might have wedged an irreparable distance between them with what she’s done— are tormenting her.

“— I'm sorry,” she finally breathes out, expression reproachful, looking away again from Pieck as she says it. She wraps her hands in the collar of her hoodie and dips her head so it hides her mouth as well, as if afraid of what will come out of it. 

The next thing she feels is a weight disappearing from in front of her and moving closer to her side on the bed. Then there are two arms, slender but strong, enveloping themselves around her. Annie lets out a brief sound of surprise, but that soon is muffled when she’s pressed face to face with Pieck’s upper chest as Pieck cards her fingers into her hair to stroke her head. She catches a scent like fresh linen and something sweeter as she breathes in against Pieck. 

“You don't have to be sorry for anything,” Pieck murmurs. “Why are you apologising?”

Several rebuttals fester underneath her skin. _I don't know if you wanted it. I'm sorry for wanting to kiss you. I'm wrong. I'm an idiot and I can't stand myself_. But they all feel feeble in the face of Pieck’s sincerity.

Her resolve crumbling, she croaks out an honest answer. “For kissing you,“ she pauses, then peppers on, “without thinking.” 

Here she hesitates, brows lightly furrowed, trying to find the right words. Pieck waits patiently, curling her arms a little tighter around Annie as she thinks— she gives her space without rushing her. When Annie continues, she can sense Pieck giving her undivided attention; there’s a small nudge at the top of her head as Pieck encourages her to speak. And then it spills out from her: “I haven't made sure you’re actually alright with it. I've probably assumed incorrectly.”

Pieck suddenly stifles a huff of laughter. Annie can feel it, with the way Pieck’s chest shakes a little. 

“I thought it was fairly obvious I didn't mind,” Pieck says, cradling a hand around the back of Annie’s neck, before continuing in a whisper. “I’m fond of you in my way, honestly and truly, Annie. I might even have liked it, if that’s not too forward for you.”

 _Forward?_ Annie thinks, incredulous, from within the haze of her guilt. Wants to say: _I was the one who kissed you, and now you have the nerve to call yourself forward_? Still, with her mind roaming like a titan in a panic, she moves onto a more pressing thought. Like with any good thing that occurs to her in her life, Annie’s first instinct is to put a pessimistic spin on her words. _Perhaps she doesn't mean any of it. Perhaps she's just being polite._

But she tries to suppress all that for the time being and focus on the here and now: Pieck’s gently undulating breath, the warm sensations of her body clinging to her, the unabating tenderness in her voice. 

For a number of years, her main reference for the closest thing resembling a worldview was her father. It’s unsurprising that “treat the whole world as your enemy” has not made her a particularly well-adjusted human. It was too general an instruction, for one. But whatever its utility, the fact remains that it’s hard now to hedge her bets upon something unquestionably good— not when her awareness of every good thing is sullied by her father’s choice parting gift, not when there is an ever-immanent possibility for things to go south. 

Perhaps it amounts to this: in her books, there is no winning when she still stands to lose something. She lives off the rotten underside of life.

And yet, and yet. There is something about Pieck that makes her willing, if not fully able yet, to take a plunge. Perhaps it’s the fact that Pieck reminds her of the better half of herself, of what she could be if she tried to reconcile all the thorns and barbs waging mental bloodshed inside her. The girl is disillusioned underneath her deceptive placidity and at times cynical, but not jaded or fatalistic like she is, not in the way that made Annie almost enshroud herself in jagged crystal not too long ago. Somehow, she manages to meet the world head-on with her wits and purpose intact.

If Annie hadn't upended the very notions of good and evil years ago while in the Training Corps, on one particularly infamous night of nihilistic introspection, she’d even say that Pieck inspires her to be a better person. After all that she’s also unlucky enough that, to ply more salt into her wounds, Pieck happens to be unbearably beautiful. 

“I thought you were sure to hate me,” she tries, radiating consternation. 

Pieck gives a gentle chortle. “I thought that _you_ stopped because I was a terrible kisser, Annie. Do you know how much worse that is?”

“God, no,” Annie snorts in reflex. “If only you knew how far from the truth that is.” _Unbearably so, really._

Pieck laughs buoyantly then, a warm, genuine sound that fills the room and makes Annie’s heart ache. The former— self-fabricated, Annie knows now— tension in the room is dissipating. “Thank you for leaving my pride intact, at least.”

Annie has one lingering thought. “Why me?” she asks quietly. Half-heartedly, as if she wants the wind to swallow her.

“Why _not_ you,” Pieck answers right away, like it is an irrefutable fact. There's soon a finger under her chin, and Annie feels her face being tilted up to look into Pieck’s calm gaze. “You're sharp. You're skilled at many things. You have a candid honesty this world needs. You're not too bad on the eyes. You're beautiful, Annie.” 

_In more ways than one,_ is what lingers, unsaid but obvious, with the last point. 

Annie flushes harder with each compliment Pieck showers forth, a mildly undignified sound escaping her lips at the last one. She's still in disbelief, suffering from the vertigo of emotional overload and the thousand revelations just unearthed to her, but it’s slowly sinking in that somehow, somewhere, her feelings aren't unwelcome. 

“I— thank you,” she manages to say, a feat given how flushed her face is. She wets her lips, a nervous habit, but when she speaks there’s a little more conviction in her words, coming from a confidence slowly mending. “I can work with that.” 

She hopes Pieck can discern the gratitude in her voice. She must, because Pieck hums an appreciative sound in response.

There are still many uncertainties that trouble her. Her biggest enemy, after all this time, is her own self, and her ongoing struggle to come to terms with all the fractured identities she was saddled with after Paradis: a child soldier, a bargaining chip in Marley’s plans, a mass-murdering terrorist beyond the pale of mercy. It isn't so much the fact that she’s being curtailed by external forces as the fact that she feels like there is something irredeemably wrong at the core of herself, something that makes her undeserving of affection in the universal. And she was convinced of it a long time ago: she lies beyond the remit of kindness. There never has been a manual written for Eldian Warriors on coming to terms with the moral transgressions they would be forced to commit in their position. She has no logical apparatus, no framework of reference for how to recuperate an understanding of herself where her crimes and human fallibilities can sit comfortably side-by-side. 

And that makes for what is perhaps the loneliest existence Annie has ever known.

But— here she tries to move away from thinking in absolutes— perhaps there still is time to learn. And if anyone who would know and could teach her, it is Pieck. Pieck, who is stuck in similar trenches, whose purpose in being here is also a father, who has seen the undercast rot in the world— and still manages to keep going.

And she resolves to still her anxiety, for the time being, and turn her focus to Pieck. 

Now that the panic of before is over, many more questions are swimming in her head. She's in a mild daze from coming to terms with all the implications of what this means for the both of them. 

As if hearing her thoughts, Pieck speaks up before she can burrow herself into self-recrimination any further. “We don’t have to figure it out right away, Annie. You can take however long you need,” she whispers gently into Annie’s ear. 

Annie is only too grateful for the reprieve to collect her thoughts. She gives a resolute nod. Pieck adjusts her position to rest her face in Annie’s neck, and smiles. The brush of her upturned lips against her skin is doing strange things to Annie’s heart. She schools her senses enough to lift a hand and stroke her fingers gently through Pieck’s soft dark hair in response. Pieck burrows her face and body closer to Annie in return, a motion that triggers a slight skidding of breath from Annie.

Slowly, the steadfast rhythm of Pieck’s breathing calms her down. With every passing second, it sinks in: they’re not going anywhere. Pieck’s not going anywhere.

After everything that just happened in the last ten minutes, she’s more than a little dazed, more than a little baffled, but also feeling grounded and resolute. Somehow, Pieck’s seen some of her worst sides. Somehow, she’s witnessed them with a flicker of self-recognition within herself. Somehow, she’s still here.

And maybe, she allows herself to think, now that she knows how Pieck feels, she wouldn't do things any differently if she could choose again. 

She decides to make good on one more promise, and renounce another one made to her father at the same time. She leans in towards Pieck again, to kiss her properly this time.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this three months ago, in actuality, and it is so indulgent that i was and still am almost afraid to put it up. but i have decided that one of my resolutions this year is to simply have fun with writing without worrying excessively about quality. and so, in light of that, i will say now: i am sorry, but also not very sorry.
> 
> my appreciation for this one goes to a few people: a friend who read an early draft of this, for reassuring me that it was good enough; whiteasy and minos_forlorn for their immeasurably generous words; and my partner, who helped me to regain faith in my writing these few difficult months. you have all been so very kind, and this piece would still be languishing at the bottom of my private archive if not for everyone.
> 
> comments and feedback are welcome and appreciated, as always.


End file.
